Phototherapy is a medical and veterinary technique which uses lasers, light emitting diodes (LEDs) or other types of light sources to stimulate or inhibit cellular function. Recently, this technique has been widely used for treating soft tissue injury, chronic pain, and promoting wound healing for both human and animal targets.
Typically, the phototherapy procedure involves radiating light energy in the ultraviolet (UV), visible, or infrared wavelength onto or into the patient's skin. It is highly desirable to precisely control the dose of light energy that is applied on a specific treatment area to achieve an optimum therapeutic effect. However, none of the existing phototherapy apparatuses could fulfill this task due to the following reasons. First, the therapeutic light generally has a non-uniform beam profile, i.e. the light intensity varies significantly from the center to the edge of the light beam. Thus the treatment area inevitably receives uneven energy dosages. Second, some therapeutic light (e.g. the infrared light) is invisible to the human eyes. In these cases, an aiming beam in the visible wavelength is generally provided to guide the therapeutic light. However, due to their wavelength and power difference, the aiming beam generally has an intensity profile different from that of the therapeutic light, which prevents it from providing precise dosage guidance to the clinician or practitioner. Third, the practitioner or clinician usually needs to scan the therapeutic light beam to cover a large treatment area, making it even harder to track the exact delivered energy dosage for any specific region of the area.
There thus exists a need for an improved phototherapy apparatus, which can provide real time monitoring of the delivered light energy dosage on the subject surface of the patient for assisting the practitioner or clinician in precisely controlling the phototherapy procedure.